TanStack Intent

TanStack Intent is an open-source CLI tool built by TanStack that lets library maintainers author, validate, and publish Agent Skills directly inside their npm packages. Currently in alpha, it bridges the gap between static documentation and AI-agent consumption by giving packages a versioned, structured way to ship usage guidance that agents can discover and load on demand.

What It Is

TanStack Intent sits at the intersection of package tooling and agent infrastructure. A library maintainer authors a SKILL.md file alongside their source code, declares which documentation files the skill depends on, validates the structure in CI, and includes the file in the npm tarball. When a consumer's workspace runs Intent, it scans installed dependencies for these static skill files—without executing any package code—and surfaces relevant guidance to an AI agent only when the active task calls for it.

How the Maintainer Loop Works

The workflow follows four stages that keep skills tightly coupled to the code they describe:

• Author – Write a SKILL.md with source references pointing to the relevant docs files.
• Validate – Run structure and source-reference checks in CI to catch stale or broken links before release.
• Publish – Include the skill file in the npm files array so it ships with every package version.
• Discover – The public registry indexes package history, making versioned skill history browsable after indexing.

Because the package version and the skill version are the same artifact, consumers always get guidance that matches the exact library version they have installed.

Consumer Trust Model and Discovery

Intent's discovery mechanism is designed to be safe by default. It reads package metadata and static skill files from the workspace lockfile without executing any package code. An allowlist and exclusions list decide which packages may contribute guidance, and a skill is only loaded when the current agent task is relevant. The homepage notes that "editor and install hooks may streamline discovery" but explicitly states they "are not a security boundary."

The intent stale command flags skills whose declared source documentation has changed since the skill was authored. Critically, the tool does not claim to understand whether the semantic advice is still correct—it surfaces a review signal and leaves the judgment call to the maintainer.

CLI and Tooling Surface

TanStack Intent is distributed as an npm package (@tanstack/intent) and used primarily through its CLI. Key commands include intent install for setup and intent stale for freshness checks. The project is written in TypeScript, licensed under MIT, and hosted at github.com/TanStack/intent. It is part of the broader TanStack ecosystem alongside Query, Router, Table, Form, and other libraries.

Update: v0.3.6

The latest release is v0.3.6, published in July 2026. The repository was created in January 2026 and has seen active development, with the last push in August 2026. The project is labeled alpha on the homepage, signaling that the API and conventions are still stabilizing. The homepage lists 1M total downloads and 103,914 weekly downloads across the TanStack npm org, and the Intent repository itself has 320 GitHub stars as of the last recorded update.